Women Are Sending Chrissy Teigen No-Makeup Selfies to Push Back Against Over-Filtering

Scroll through Instagram, and it's easy to forget that things like pores, redness, and anything other than "perfect" skin exists. Look in the mirror, and of course, it's a different story, but as Chrissy Teigen pointed out on Twitter, the difference between reality and social media has reached an extreme. So after taking on the stigma around fillers, gray hair, and stretch marks, on Sunday night Teigen took on Facetune, calling for makeup artists on Instagram to lay off the filters. In response, her thread's taken off with people tweeting out their makeup-free selfies.

Teigen's tweet reads: "I don’t know what real skin looks like anymore. Makeup ppl on instagram, please stop with the smoothing (unless it’s me) just kidding (I’m torn) ok maybe just chill out a bit. People of social media just know: IT’S FACETUNE, you’re beautiful, don’t compare yourself to people ok." To which she followed with this: "Everyone looks like an oil painting."

The mental back-and-forth just in her tweet is pretty indicative of the issue. Thanks to the lack of transparency around filters and apps, it's usually impossible to know how much everyone's tweaking their photos—or if everyone actually looks like that, and you should, too, to throw up a selfie on Instagram. The standard is skewed, so the unfiltered photos that Teigen's tweet provoked are helping to even out the balance.

Yet as with most things, there are two sides to the filter debate. On the one hand, people's tweets show they agree—filtering has reaching a level with often unhealthy repercussions. But on the other hand, some people use them to feel confident when they otherwise wouldn't, and it's hard to call that a bad thing.